mgo.licio.us

"The face of the operation is Briatore (referred to exclusively in the film by his colleagues and angry, chanting detractors as "Flavio"), an anthropomorphic radish who spends most of his time at QPR plotting to fire all of the managers."

At press time, Harbaugh had sent Michigan’s athletic department an envelope containing a heavily annotated seating chart, a list of the 63,000 seat views he had found unsatisfactory, and a glowing 70-page report on section 25, row 12, seat 9, which he claimed is “exactly what the great sport of football is all about.”

MORE LIKE AMBEARCROMBIE AND BEARFITCH, AMIRITE. Offensive linemen Kyle Kalis and Erik Magnuson as models of a certain variety:

Slight difference? Naw. Yes I am going to take this opportunity to note that Kalis seems closer to the field than Magnuson solely based on resemblance to Soda Popinski.

You are victorious.Savor your victory. Spencer will eat cheese, and refugees will be settled, and if any of them look like they might have a double-digit block percentage we're sitting pretty well.

Behold the eye lasers of Brady Hoke.

They are looking. Michigan's got a couple scholarships open and Hoke got locked into a luncheon where fans pepper him with questions so the first one everyone goes with is about the backup QB—could be worse, could be the starter. Answer:

"Yeah, we are (still looking)," coach Brady Hoke said Monday before the West Michigan Sports Commission Annual Luncheon at the J.W. Marriott in Grand Rapids. "But, it's one of those things where there's a lot of I's to dot and T's to cross to make sure it's the right fit."

Michigan's got a month and a half before their summer semester starts, and hopefully they'll be able to reel in someone by then.

Um, okay then. I guess if Michigan's going to have a nonconference game at a neutral site New York isn't the worst place:

"The reception we've had in New York every year we've played there has been tremendous," Beilein said. "I think it's the plan to get there often. How often, I don't know.

"Is it every year? Every other year? I don't know. Right now, it'll be two years in a row and there's a tournament down the line we're obligated to as well. We're going to get there often."

I would prefer games on campus in all situations, but it's less of a big deal when you have Arizona and Iowa State coming in. Michigan is generally going to be the defacto home team against anyone they play there.

Regional: acquired. Also: Super Regional. Michigan got knocked out of the Big Ten softball tournament in the semis, a disappointing result for team with a 91% win rate in conference play. Despite that, Michigan did get a seed, specifically the eighth and last. That means that not only does Michigan host an NCAA regional this weekend, but if they advance they will host the super-regional.

Central Michigan vs Cal kicks things off at 4:30 PM Friday; Michigan hosts Valpo at 7PM. Unlike the Big Ten tourney, NCAA regionals are double-elimination. Valpo is 34-25 and was 11-9 in the Horizon League; they should be a pushover. Cal had a good overall record but was 10-14 in the Pac-12; Michigan mowed CMU down 11-0 in a mercy-rule game about three weeks ago.

Moar replays, fewer charges. The NCAA basketball rules committee didn't do much. They allowed some late-game replays—just what the game needs, more stoppages—and changed the charge rule so that a defender need to be set before an offensive player "starts his upward motion" to pass or shoot to not get called for a block.

I am not a fan. The game's problems stem from a refusal to call obvious fouls, as anyone who's flipped on the NBA playoffs after immersing themselves in this year's Big Ten schedule has been shocked to find out. All that hand-checking? Yeah, gone.

Tightening up the charge rule in that manner just seems unfair to the defender, who can get there in plenty of time and still get nailed because he didn't anticipate that by the time he was getting plowed in the chest the offensive player would put his arms up.

I am vaguely hopeful the proverbial crackdown will be more effective. From Andy Glockner:

The other changes, which really are just a re-emphasis of existing rules on the book, will require officials to consistently and, perhaps exhaustively, crack down on handchecking, armbars, and other techniques used both on a primary ballhandler and on cutters moving through the lane. If the officials do call this regularly, we’ll end up with a lot of fouls and free throws early in the season, and then hopefully teams will adjust and we’ll see better, more free-flowing offense later in the campaign. The off-ball contact in the lane is an especially big problem in the college game, and it will again challenge coaches who teach this as part of their defensive approach to find another way to successfully guard.

If that actually gets called like the NBA, the game is going to get a lot cleaner once we get past the section of time when all games are horrible foul-fests. That would be great for Michigan, which is historically a low-foul team that uses a crapton of cuts.

I AGREE WITH NICK SABAN. I've been agreeing with Dave Brandon lately about things like "how many conference games should we have?" and "should we schedule Virginia Tech," so I may as well just agree with everyone about everything. Here we go:

“I’m for five conferences – everybody playing everybody in those five conferences,” theAlabama coach said Thursday night before speaking at a Crimson Caravan stop. “That’s what I’m for, so it might be 70 teams, and everybody’s got to play ’em. …”

Saban reiterated his desire for the SEC to expand from eight conference games to nine per year for each team.

I… I'm with Napoleon.

Hockey commits. Michigan picked up a commit from OJHL goalie Hayden Lavigne for either next year or the year after. So while the door for Rutledge is hypothetically still open, he's just picked up two competitors for the rest of his career. I don't think he's coming back. Lavigne started 18 games last year, posting a .922 and being named "second team All-Prospect" in his league. He was a third round pick in the most recent USHL draft even though his OJHL team expects him back this year.

The addition of Lavigne signals a sea change in the way Michigan is acquiring goalies. Used to be they'd plug and play a top prospect every 3-4 years. Now they're adding a third contender to the mix, and instead of first-round draft picks they're random guys. This can work. It's clearly not the best way to go about things, but Jeff Jakatis and various Miami goalies have proven that goalies are weird and can come from anywhere.

Michigan also picked up a commit from a USHL defenseman named Cutler Martin. He's a '94 (ie, he'll be 20 when he comes in next year) and has very little internet profile out there. Seems like he'll be a third pairing guy to fill out roster depth.

At what point does something become and out-and-out lie? Here's NBC Irish blogger Keith Arnold claiming "Michigan asked to stop ND series first" because Bill Martin wanted to put in one of the occasional two-year hiatuses that the series has seen since its resurrection. Is this merely dishonest or a flat out lie? I think it's actually the latter, since of course "stopping" the ND series is something you do when you, say, cancel all future games. Michigan never had any intention of doing that.

The point of the diaries! Leading off: a fantastic diary from MCalibur on the increased vulnerability of spread option quarterbacks, or, apparently, the lack thereof. "Do spread quarterbacks get injured more?" is a question I've abdicated on before, citing the lack of a reliable injury database that could provide a comprehensive answer without good old fashioned grunt work. MCalibur grunted his way to a money graf after splitting quarterbacks into four quartiles based on run/pass ratio, with group 3 your Pat White sorts and group 0* your John Navarre sorts:

On a percentage basis the only group that suffered an out of norm injury percentage were level 2 QBs which I think of as QBs that are used like running backs (Juice Williams) or QBs that are too slow to be running in the first place (Steven Threet). All other groups suffered injuries at about a 23% clip. Meaning about 1 out of every 4 QBs in a given category lost playing time due to injury in 2008.

Though I don't agree with totally dismissing the increased injury rate of "group 2" QBs, the numbers here are small enough that it seems like an outlier. The Pat Whites got injured at at the same rate as groups 1 and 2, and group one was by far the hardest hit in terms of man-games lost. There is definitely no clear correlation between lots of runs and injury.

Caveat: as noted, the sample size here is small. The numbers are suggestive but not definitive. It's not impossible a larger study would show a better correlation between runs and injury. It is, however, pretty unlikely. Outstanding work; I have bestowed a bonus 100 (meaningless!) points. Misopogon also picked up the bonus for the numbers post front-paged last night. At some point these will be useful, I swear.

*(Dollars to donuts this means MCalibur is a coder. He's zero-indexing his arrays.)

Meanwhile on the roster. Michigan applied for three medical redshirts last year and news reports had confirmed that two of them—Adam Patterson, now a redshirt junior, and Junior Hemingway, now a redshirt sophomore—had been approved. The third was Kenny Demens, who the roster now lists as a redshirt freshman. Obviously inference: Demens, too, got his redshirt.

Transcript here if you don't want to bother with the video. I read it and decided against it; there is zero of value in there. There is also creepy dark cell-phone video from The Big Ten Network talking to Mark Ortmann and Stevie Brown:

Can we get in on that? Yankee Stadium is poised to host outstandingly competitive games between Notre Dame and Army—why do you hate America, Notre Dame?—starting in 2010. This has caused Army to sign up a half-dozen future Yankee Stadium games against other East Coast schools and Yankee Stadium to start thinking bigger and possibly more competitive:

The Daily News has learned that there have been discussions between the NCAA and high-ranking Yankee officials, including managing general partner Hal Steinbrenner, about the possibility of establishing a postseason bowl game at Yankee Stadium, beginning in 2011.

And… hey… can we get in on that? And in a meaningful way, not a goofy Motor City Bowl sort of way? I would love the opportunity to watch some other Big Ten team freeze its ass off in New York against some warm-weather team and caveman their way to astounding victories. Hell, if Michigan ended up in it I might even go depending on just how Christmas-impinging the thing is. Why don't we boot the Alamo Bowl to the curb—cold or not, there is no comparison between San Antonio and New York—and take on any comers in the frozen northlands?

Erm? I've never had the Erin Andrews-level obsession that much of the rest of the college football blogosphere has with stat ninja Phil Steele, but I do respect his research-mad ways and how he eschews the sort of punditry that can best be summed up with the word "Cowherd."

7. Rich Rodriguez, Michigan – The Wolverines could be an underdog in as many as 7 games this year and they really must have a winning season. I think Rodriguez will get them to a decent bowl and make major strides just like he did in his 2nd year at West Virginia. Amazingly there are a lot of Michigan alumni who think Rodriguez runs a pass-happy spread offense! In his last 6 years at West Virginia his teams averaged 270 ypg rushing the football (148 ypg pass) while Michigan in that same span had 229 ypg PASSING and just 163 ypg rush.

Not only does that "7" represent Phil Steele's placement of Rich Rodriguez on his top 13 "hot seat" list—ahead of Charlie Freakin' Weis!—but I would like to meet the Michigan fan not in a coma that believes Rich Rodriguez piloted a pass-happy spread offense featuring Pat White.

Never fear, though. Sensing a threat to their hard-earned possession of 2009's Dumbest Statement About Michigan Football, CFN strikes back:

More scheduling bits. I have no idea about the veracity of any of these rumors, but the following five schools have been kicked about the internet in the wake of Rodriguez's announcement that Michigan would likely find a BCS school to have a home-and-home with. In ascending order of plausibility:

5. Duke. In a word: no. Michigan could get a Duke-level opponent without a return game, and has in the recent past when they scheduled Vandy. Duke's existence in the list of four teams batted about (all listed save UConn) reduces the plausibility of the rest of them.

4. UConn. UConn isn't Duke but they aren't a ton better from a program perspective. (They're obviously better on the field.) It's hard to envision Michigan playing at 40,000 seat Rentschler field. And it's hard to envision UConn agreeing to another neutral site game after their sellout series with Notre Dame was met with resistance from the state legislature and brokered down to six games from the original ten with a provision that the Huskies play at least six true home games each year. Also, they'd have to move or cancel a game with Northeastern. Also also, the recruiting exposure would be nil.

3. Pitt. This was addressed yesterday: in 2010 Pitt already has Miami and Notre Dame scheduled, with ND on the road. Even though they've got an extra nonconference game because they're in the Big East, that would be a foolishly challenging setup for either Wannstedt battling for his job or the new guy looking to get off on the right foot.

2. Oregon State. Oregon State is a plausible opponent, but they'd have to accept a nonconference schedule of @ M, Louisville, and @ Boise State to go with their nine-game conference schedule. Has any college football team not named USC (or Troy, I guess) been that ballsy since the adoption of the 12th game?

1. Virginia. Virginia is a plausible opponent and was #3 on my list from yesterday.

As far as Cal goes, one of the guys from Cal Golden Blogs emailed me to remind me about the latest update on a potential series from their perspective:

An attempt to schedule Michigan "fell through." Not sure if that would have been for this year, and that's why we had to scramble to get Eastern Washington. Tedford did say that he doesn't want to play too many good teams and prefers A, B, C scheduling. He stressed he always wants a home-home series, and that they're "not interested" in playing somebody without a return game. In regards to a suggestion that we play Notre Dame, Sandy Barbour, who used to work for Notre Dame, added, "The Irish are afraid."

"Are you hungry to prove yourself and not have a sense of entitlement? We talked quite a bit about not having the sense of entitlement," Rodriguez said. "It's good to have pride, but when that pride becomes too much, you're going to get humbled pretty quick. I think, in a sense, that happened to us."

There have been gigabytes spilled about this very topic on Michigan message boards from one end of the internet to the other: had Michigan fallen into complacency as Carr aged and the spittle ceased to fleck? What is this program, who does it belong to, and what is "being Michigan"? At what point do people start to kick ass again? And by "people" we mean "us"? That's not a question.

Right: This is Barwis culture shock in a couple sentences from the head man, and speaks to the difficulty Rodriguez had adapting Carr's culture to his. This has to be better now; anyone who hasn't transferred should be in for the long haul.